Hope for Nawayathi

A Mumbai-based software developer has created a digital font for an endangered Bhatkal language in an attempt to preserve it.

There were three missing characters in the Nawayathi script,” says Mohammed Mohsin Shabandri, speaking to Mirror from Bhatkal, in Karnataka. Shabandri, who worked as the innovation manager for a foreign airline, now dedicates his time to the efforts of Nawayath Mehfil, an organisation which works to preserve the culture of the Nawayath community, of which he is a member. Two months ago, Shabandri and other members of the group came down to Mumbai to meet software engineer Syed Manzar Zaidi to ask him to create these missing letters, and to develop a digital font for the script.

At an event in Bhatkal today, the organisation will launch the new digital font, a keyboard that supports it, and it will also unveil the three new characters that Zaidi has developed.

“Ours is a small community though our ancestors migrated to India about a thousand years ago,” said Shabandri, whose group is determined to revive the regional tongue. Creating a digital font for the language that’s written in the rightto-left Persian script, they believe, is the first step towards this goal. “It will make it more accessible to the next generation, and allow it to be used in publications,” says Zaidi, 49. He tells us that while the language is spoken widely, few know how to read or write it because of its limited use in magazines and newspapers.

Since the 1990s, Zaidi and his team at Mazgaon-based Axis SoftMedia — centre for research in digital calligraphy, have developed Unicode fonts for Pashto, Kashmiri, Hazaragi, Saraiki, and various other languages with right-to-left scripts. “Back when I started, most desktop publishing software programmes had no support for right-to-left scripts,” Zaidi says.

He created most of the nasta’liq fonts used in InPage’s Urdu software, but creating the font for Nawayathi posed a unique set of challenges. For one, the language — a blend of Konkani, Tulu, Marathi, Urdu and Persian, with a few English and Arabic words in it too — includes characters whose phonetic pronunciation falls between the pronunciation of Urdu characters. “Like, the sound of a character may be somewhere between ‘ch’ and sh’,” says Zaidi.

Pointing out that the word ‘Nawayath,’ translates as ‘newcomers’ Shabandri adds: “Our ancestors were probably Arabs or Persians. Many of them married into the local Jain community, when they settled down in India. Our language, traditions and food were influenced by all the communities they interacted with.” To create a font for this complex language, Zaidi relied on some 200-year-old texts that the Bhatkal group made available to him. He also developed a keyboard to support the font. “After installation of this keyboard, you just go to Microsoft Word, change the language setting to Nawayath, pick the Nawayath font, and you can start typing in the language. You don’t even have to download the font,” Zaidi says.

It was a herculean task to accommodate all the permutations for the characters on a keyboard, “so multiple keys have to be held down together to achieve certain arrangements of letters,” he adds. “I was able to complete all aspects of this project in a fortnight thanks to my extensive experience with Urdu. Since then, the product has been thoroughly tested.” Now, Zaidi can’t wait to see it used.

Syed Manzar Zaidi has also created Unicode fonts for Pashto and Saraiki

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